Your Californian correspondent, suffering from unusual skin coloration* recently diagnosed as a ’tan’ writes:
“This past weekend saw Carnethy West field a team at the famous Lake Tahoe Relays: a 73 mile, 7 person relay race around stunning Lake Tahoe in the Sierra Nevada.
Fun Fact 1: it was the 52nd running of this event, making it the longest running road relay race in the US.
Fun Fact 2: if Lake Tahoe was emptied, it would submerge California under 15” of water (15” = 15 inches = 38cm for you metric converts)
I am forming a new hypothesis on running; stated thusly: “all locales have an identical collection of running club personalities”.
(Digression: for anyone who bore witness to (and was bored by) my Winter Talk, which ‘briefly’ touched on my current thoughts on Strava, I will note that I am living deep, deep behind enemy lines in California.)
Let me explain: in my last competitive outing, Carnethy West (henceforth abbreviated as CWVTC) were beaten by the San Franciscan version of the Shits Shettleston (see http://carnethy.com/2016/05/carnethy-west-valley-track-club-race-report/). In this race, our main competition were the North Californian version of HBT (sans bog brown vests singlets, thankfully).
This was my first weekend away with CWVTC, which has not disproved my hypothesis, since – aside from the different accents and the fact that we stayed in a house with a hot tub rather than a bunkhouse [idea for future bookings, Jasrad: I will only come over for the FRAs if this can be guaranteed] – this felt like it could have been a trip away with Carnethy. The implication: I had a jolly good time.
(Digression: my hypothesis goes further: that you can find identical runner personalities in said clubs too. But I’ll not get into that now.)
Enough preamble: to the race.
The relay is 7 legs, each around 10 miles long, running from point to point ‘counter-clockwise’ around the road that does a complete loop of the lake. The roads are not closed during the race. (Note to self: face oncoming traffic = LHS of the road here.)
Fun Fact 3: americans LOVE driving around lake Tahoe…
The way logistics work out, the rest of the team tend to drive around the lake, stopping every couple of miles to offer water – it gets HOT – and cheering (or shout splits to chasing/chased HBT runners) to the current racer, before speeding to the start of the next leg to give the next leg’s runner a chance to warm-up. This worked out surprisingly well, with no major mishaps, and offered lots of opportunity for fun, such as blasting some Rammstein out the window as we passed our German 3rd leg runner.
Fun Fact 4: all Germans love Rammstein and ‘Wellness’.
I regret to inform you that CWVTC were, once again, beaten into second place, this time by HBT.
Since I’m an egomaniac, I will only describe my leg, the second, in detail:. 8.2 miles, all uphill, with a solid 300m climb in the last 3.5miles. I started in 3rd, about 4 minutes behind 1st and 2 minutes behind second and managed to pull back to within 10s of 2nd and a couple of minutes behind 1st. It was the first time I had raced at altitude and I was told that I should try to start very conservatively (apparently you run ~20-30s/mile slower) and find my racing pace. This proved to be difficult since my road racing experience is so limited that I don’t even know what that should be at sea level, and I had been relying on a close race in leg 1 to pace myself of other, more experienced racers. In the end, I went out too hard, suffered for it until a mini-downhill when I was able to get my breathing under control. Then, miraculously, when I hit the hill at 5 miles I caught a glimpse of a runner up ahead and managed to gut myself to get to within touching distance before I ran out of hill. I tagged Rammstein-runner and collapsed in the car to go cheer him on.
We were still in 3rd after the 3rd leg, but the gap to first had closed, then our 4th leg runner – who just happens to be the ‘indoor marathon’ world record holder (maybe the only one to have done something so daft?) – managed to bring us into 1st, only for us to lose it again on the hilly 6th leg to an excellent trail runner. Our final runner managed to take the gap from 2 minutes to 90 seconds and the closest finish to the race in years! Next year we’ll beat those pesky boggies.
But, although, the race is only a small part of the weekend, I am running out of time before my stop on the train home from work, so I’ll mention some extra-curricular highlights:
– American large milkshakes are rather large;
– the water in Lake Tahoe is perfect for an ice bath swim;
– the long Sunday hangover run was a delight: ascending up past the snow line, with excellent view of the lake (see attached photo).
All in all: great fun, and an excuse to don my new pink shorts again. I’ll try to find some photos of the race itself.”
*and american spelling. Aluminum.
Iain Whiteside